By India McCarty
Erin and Ben Napier hope their latest home improvement project gives their daughters an appreciation for the generations that came before.
“We both want our kids to grow up with a love of gardening,” Ben told Southern Living of the greenhouse and garden he built for Erin as a Mother’s Day surprise.
He continued, “We want them to know how to do all the stuff our parents and the generations before them did. It was a big part of growing up and feels like something that has been lost in the last couple of decades.”
Ben was initially inspired to create the greenhouse after a renovation of the barn on the couple’s property.
“We had to replace the doors, so suddenly I had these pieces of wood that I didn’t want to just throw out,” he explained, adding that the wood was later incorporated into the greenhouse’s siding.
The greenhouse and garden also contain several nods to the couple’s history, from reclaimed windows left over from HOME TOWN projects to wood milled in Ben’s own Scotsman Manufacturing workshop.
“Every detail was very intentional. It’s the only way I do things,” he said.
“Most important, there are railing pieces from Titanic!” added Erin, a massive fan of the movie (she saw it 13 times in theaters). “My dad and I even built a model Titanic together. I was obsessed, mostly with the music.”
Ben tracked down salvaged metal pieces from the shipwreck and incorporated them into fence rail posts, sharing, “They’re all cast iron and built exactly the way they were on the boat originally. “For Erin, that’s the coolest thing, but for me, it’s the Central Park benches.”
The benches, a nod to the Napiers’ New York City honeymoon, were purchased from Kenneth Lynch & Sons and were originally designed as seating for the 1939 World’s Fair.
The greenhouse and garden are part of the Napiers’ vacation home property. It was important to the couple that their daughters, Helen and Mae, had a place to spend time in nature.
“I grew up on a 40-acre chicken farm and would pick out a baby chick to be my pet every time a new load would come,” Erin told Southern Living in a 2023 interview. “My playtime consisted of climbing a lot of trees and digging for arrowheads in the woods. That’s not something our girls can do in town. I want their bathwater to be dirty at the end of the day, so it means they weren’t just playing on screens.”
They also hope to instill an appreciation for small town life in their daughters; specifically, through their work on HOME TOWN TAKEOVER.
“I hope our girls see that the reason we get up and go to work every day, and the reason it matters so much, is that these small towns in America are the flavor of America,” Erin told Yahoo Entertainment. “Whether it’s Laurel [Miss., where the family lives] or Fort Morgan, all of them have something very special to offer in the American experience.”
She continued, “I hope [our daughters] don’t feel like they can only live their dream in a big city, because that’s just not the case. You can have the dream wherever you are, especially in such a connected age when you have access to the internet. You can live in any small town in America and live the life you want. And that’s what I’m excited about, that we can tell that story.”
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